‘He’s going back smoothly… and he’s free.’
With the fuel transfer complete, Barry Neal raised the Vulcan over the RT.
‘Clear the position as you wish.’
‘Going to starboard,’ Martin Withers answered, back at the controls of his jet.
‘Well done. Right, we’ll take you home.’ Neal left it a moment then, almost as an afterthought, he asked how it had all gone. ‘Did you have a successful mission?’
There was a long pause, filled with static, as Withers thought about how to respond. Then the RT clicked.
‘Not so bad.’ He sounded utterly exhausted.
Chapter 43
Bob Tuxford and his crew touched down on Runway One Four just after one o’clock in the afternoon. Over the previous fourteen hours, sufficient fuel had transferred in and out of his Victor’s tanks to power a fleet of ten family saloon cars around the entire circumference of the planet. Twice.
During the final leg of the flight, once the success of the last RV had assured his aircraft’s safety, Tuxford’s mind was free to consider how on earth they’d even got into such a terrible situation. At every bracket and with each new contact, the carefully constructed refuelling plan had gone more and more awry. Worn out at the end of an epic fourteen hours, he tried to pick through the bones of the mission. He knew one thing: in reporting the night’s events, he decided, he wasn’t going to hold back.
After taxiing to dispersal, he and his weary crew shut down the aircraft’s engines and systems, unstrapped and gathered their kit. Warm tropical air filled the cabin as soon as the crew hatch was opened. As they fell out of the jet like wet rags, they were filmed by an Ops officer with a rattling 8mm movie camera. Each man was handed a cold beer before being escorted to the Ops tent for hot-debriefing by Jerry Price and Alan Bowman. Tuxford didn’t pull his punches. Every tanker crew, he felt, had pushed themselves to the limit to get the Vulcan south. The memory of the disappointment he’d felt as 607 had followed them round towards the north was still fresh in his mind. No one yet knew all the facts, but Tuxford felt let down and angry. And the focus for his unhappiness was the Vulcan detachment.
Monty was no more aware of the big picture than Tuxford. And although at midday news had reached Wideawake that the Vulcan’s final RV had been a success, his friend, Martin Withers, and his crew were still out there. It was also evident that they must have had a nerve-shredding time over the South Atlantic. So when the terrier-like Scot learnt from one of the American civilian air traffic controllers that a tanker had to be scrambled to bring Tux home, he began jumping to the wrong conclusions. It was clear that BLACK BUCK had come close to disaster; and as he felt all eyes start to turn on him and the Vulcan’s performance, Monty, perhaps understandably, tried to look elsewhere for answers. And Tuxford’s captaincy came under his scrutiny. For the Victor pilot to have put himself and his crew into such a perilous position – to have pressed on like that – Monty thought, was unforgivably irresponsible. As he met Tuxford after the hot-debriefing with Price and Bowman, he challenged him about it.
‘Look, I didn’t just do it off my own back,’ Tuxford shot back at him. ‘It wasn’t my sole decision as commander of the aeroplane.’
‘Oh, I see, it’s captaincy by committee is it?’
‘Well, yes, it is. That’s exactly right. As far as I’m concerned, my crew members had a right to a say. And I can tell you that they wholeheartedly supported the view that we should continue the mission.’
‘You should be court-martialled.’
‘I’m not talking to you, you arsehole,’ Tuxford spat and pushed past.
Nerves were frayed. Monty didn’t know it yet but in lashing out, out of concern for a friend, he was attacking the man whose courage and skill had kept his friend in the air and his mission on track. As the scale of what had been achieved became apparent, a court-martial started to look very unlikely.
The BBC news report followed the old ‘lillibullero’ theme tune. The HF radio might have left a little to be desired when trying to communicate across thousands of miles of ocean, but it picked up the World Service well enough. The headline was the same as the earlier broadcast picked up by Bob Tuxford’s Victor: a lone Vulcan has successfully attacked the runway at Port Stanley. The crew, it assured them, were safe.
‘I think’, said Gordon Graham laconically, ‘they must be talking about us…’
‘We haven’t even bloody landed yet!’ Hugh Prior said, incredulous. ‘And here they are broadcasting it to the world.’ It was the word ‘successful’ that got him. As far as he was concerned, it wasn’t successful until they were safely on the ground. Martin Withers enjoyed the moment. With fuel in the tanks, they could at least laugh about it. For the first time since the message had come through from John Reeve’s Vulcan telling them they were on, the tension really lifted. There’d been undisguised relief at completing the final fuel transfer, but now there were smiles. The BBC was reporting the success of the raid. They must have done it.
Prior slotted a cassette belonging to Pete Taylor into the AEO’s tape recorder and pressed play. Through six sets of headphones, the persistent synthesized rhythm and stirring melody of Vangelis’ Chariots of Fire theme tune began to play. Since the Oscar-winning movie’s release the previous year, the music had become something of an unofficial anthem for the Withers crew. And now, as they cruised back to Ascension after their marathon operation, it provided an appropriately rousing soundtrack.
The press arrived at Waddington before 607 had landed at Ascension. The same cameras that had been blind to her departure for Ascension two days earlier returned. The attention, flattering as it might be, was unwelcome. Enormous pressure was applied to requests for interviews and information, but John Laycock resisted it. Too much was still unclear, but it was becoming apparent that the mission would turn out to be BLACK BUCK ONE. Others would follow and their security and that of the crews that would fly them needed to be protected. But the radio and television reports – and the subsequent newspaper coverage – had an interesting effect on Simon Baldwin. Over the previous month he’d concentrated on nothing but trying to ensure that his CORPORATE flight could do what it was being asked to do. He’d never had the opportunity or inclination to stand back and look at it with any sense of perspective. But in capturing the attention of the media – even though he reckoned barely 30 per cent of what was being reported was accurate – the size of their achievement finally sank in. He found a piece of string and placed it over a globe, stretched between Waddington and the Falklands. Even I’m impressed, he thought.
His frustration with the planning and the unfortunate run-in with Monty hadn’t dented Bob Tuxford’s appreciation of what the Vulcan had pulled off. He knew that his crew and the men on board 607 had been through something unique and he wanted to be the first to congratulate them. He wanted to look Withers in the eyes. While three of his worn-out crew headed straight for bed, Tuxford and his AEO, Mick Beer, nicked a couple of bikes from outside the Ops tent. The two of them cycled off to the American commissary in search of something they could hand out to the returning bomber crew.
As they pedalled back down the cinder road towards the airhead carrying tins of cold beer, they realized they were going to be part of a large crowd waiting to welcome the Vulcan home.